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CU Spaceflight is a student-run society at Cambridge University. It is founded with the aim of achieving access to space, with minimal financial expenses. The society is supported by the Cambridge-MIT Institute. [1]
The society was founded in the summer of 2006, with the specific goal of launching a rocket into space for less than GBP£1000. [2]
As of November, 2007, CU Spaceflight has launched five non-crewed high-altitude balloons, of which two were not successful: [3] Nova 2 was blown into the North Sea and Nova 5 failed to ignite the Martlet 1 solid rocket motor, but landed in a reusable state.
CU Spaceflight is a participant of the UK High Altitude Society.
On 27 June 2007, CU Spaceflight won the Owlstone Photography Prize, having submitted an unenhanced photograph from the Nova 1 flight, displaying the curvature of the Earth as seen from Near space. The entry was entitled "Earth from 32 km". CU Spaceflight won a cash prize and 25-hours of workshop time. [4]
As of 2007 [update] , Cambridge University Spaceflight has three projects which it is pursuing; all three are critical to the long-term goal of successfully launching a rocket into space and retrieving it.
Nova is CU Spaceflight's first project and has the objective of launching high-altitude balloons on test flights to near space. The lifting gas used is helium.
| Mission Name | Launch Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Nova 0 | N/A | Prototype for the Nova programme, and never flew, despite being capable of doing so. [5] |
| Nova 1 | 9 November 2006 | Launched from Cambridge, UK. It reached a maximum altitude of 32 kilometres (105,000 feet) and landed by parachute 3 hours later. [1] Following recovery, 857 still images were downloaded from the on-board cameras. [6] |
| Nova 2 | 19 November 2006 | The near spacecraft suffered a mechanical failure and was blown off into the North Sea by high winds. All contact was lost and it has yet to be recovered. Nova 2 was the first unsuccessful mission in the Nova programme. |
| Nova 3 | 21 January 2007 | It was originally intended to carry a UK High Altitude Society payload consisting of several modules, but electronic failures prevented this from being the case. Nova 3 served as a test flight for a cutdown mechanism, and was located in Germany on 23 January 2007. The payload was arranged to be sent back to CU Spaceflight. |
| Nova 4 | 7 March 2007 | Concept demonstrator for a launch platform for the Martlet 1 rocket. The payload carried included all components necessary to fire a rocket except the rocket itself. The mission reached 20 kilometres, and landed at 8 m/s. |
| Nova 5 | 24 March 2007 | Launched from the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, into overcast cloud. It was launched in front of a crowd at the Cambridge Science Week (as part of CU Spaceflight's outreach programme). It was intended to fire the Martlet 1 rocket, but the igniter failed and the rocket never left the balloon. Both vehicles were recovered on 12 April 2007, in a fully reusable state. Following the unsuccessful mission, CU Spaceflight announced they would be working towards their next Martlet launch with the MIT Rocket Team, an MIT student society also aimed at cheap space access. |
| Nova 6 | 24 July 2008 | After an extended period of not launching due to insurance difficulties, CU Spaceflight returned the Nova programme to flight with the launch of Nova 6. After analysis of GPS data logs after a successful landing, it was officially confirmed that Nova 6 had broken Nova 1's altitude record, thus setting a new British record (Nova 1 was the prior record holder), about 260 metres higher than that of the first flight. |
| Nova 7 | 25 July 2008 | The high-altitude balloon was launched shortly after 3:30 AM BST. The near spacecraft was successfully recovered. |
| Nova 8 | 28 August 2008 | Launched 4:07 AM BST; dawn launch. Successfully videoed and photographed sunrise from high altitude, a major mission objective. Recovered less than a kilometre from software-predicted landing site. |
| Nova 9 | 1 December 2008 | Launched in collaboration with Parkside School carrying 4 teddies wearing spacesuits designed by students up to 30 kilometres. This launch received significant press coverage around the world. |
Meteor is a project designed to provide a landing system for falling body to a 100-metre accuracy, from any point within the Earth's atmosphere. The Meteor project will use a paraglider to land objects.
Martlet is the project aimed at the development of a small rocket and launch system which can be launched from a Nova balloon in the upper atmosphere.
CU Spaceflight aim the final Martlet rocket to be less than 1 metre long, weigh 3.5 kilograms, and carry a 0.5 kg payload. The intended cost per launch is less than GBP£1000. The rocket will be a solid-fuel rocket. Its objective is to reach suborbital space – i.e. reaching altitudes in excess of 100 km (the boundary of space).
The idea of a balloon-launched rocket – a rockoon – is not new, but is rarely practiced. The incentives for air-based launch are that the altitude the balloons reach are in the near space region – which is above 99% of the atmosphere – thus resulting in significantly less atmospheric drag, requiring far less rocket fuel.
| Mission Name | Launch Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Martlet 0 | 1 March 2009 | A successful ground launch of a prototype for the final Martlet rocket. It was launched at the EARS rocketry site reaching a height just under 9,000 ft and a speed of around the speed of sound. The rocket motor used was a commercial J-class motor, however the rocket casing is designed for a motor with three times the power. |
Since its inception, Cambridge University Spaceflight has been covered by several major news sources, including The Guardian [7] and BBC News. [8]
Photos from the Nova 9 launch were printed in many national newspapers including The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Members of the team also gave interviews to the Discovery Channel, Sky News and the BBC World Service.
Following the success of Nova 1 and the announcement of the Martlet and Meteor projects, CU Spaceflight has received interest from the university's Department for Atmospheric Chemistry and the British Antarctic Survey on the results of its work.
CU Spaceflight has performed talks in secondary schools in and around Cambridge, UK, and continues to offer to do so, hoping to raise the profile of engineering and aerospace in particular.
During the 2007 Cambridge Science Festival, [9] CU Spaceflight launched their Nova 5 balloon in front of a large crowd.
The mesosphere is the third layer of the atmosphere, directly above the stratosphere and directly below the thermosphere. In the mesosphere, temperature decreases as altitude increases. This characteristic is used to define limits: it begins at the top of the stratosphere, and ends at the mesopause, which is the coldest part of Earth's atmosphere, with temperatures below −143 °C. The exact upper and lower boundaries of the mesosphere vary with latitude and with season, but the lower boundary is usually located at altitudes from 50 to 65 km above sea level, and the upper boundary is usually from 85 to 100 km.
Spaceflight is an application of astronautics to fly spacecraft into or through outer space, either with or without humans on board. Most spaceflight is uncrewed and conducted mainly with spacecraft such as satellites in orbit around Earth, but also includes space probes for flights beyond Earth orbit. Such spaceflight operate either by telerobotic or autonomous control. The more complex human spaceflight has been pursued soon after the first orbital satellites and has reached the Moon and permanent human presence in space around Earth, particularly with the use of space stations. Human spaceflight programs include the Soyuz, Shenzhou, the past Apollo Moon landing and the Space Shuttle programs. Other current spaceflight are conducted to the International Space Station and to China's Tiangong Space Station.
A spaceport or cosmodrome is a site for launching or receiving spacecraft, by analogy to a seaport for ships or an airport for aircraft. The word spaceport, and even more so cosmodrome, has traditionally been used for sites capable of launching spacecraft into orbit around Earth or on interplanetary trajectories. However, rocket launch sites for purely sub-orbital flights are sometimes called spaceports, as in recent years new and proposed sites for suborbital human flights have been frequently referred to or named "spaceports". Space stations and proposed future bases on the Moon are sometimes called spaceports, in particular if intended as a base for further journeys.
A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are used to launch instruments from 48 to 145 km above the surface of the Earth, the altitude generally between weather balloons and satellites; the maximum altitude for balloons is about 40 km and the minimum for satellites is approximately 121 km. Certain sounding rockets have an apogee between 1,000 and 1,500 km, such as the Black Brant X and XII, which is the maximum apogee of their class. Sounding rockets often use military surplus rocket motors. NASA routinely flies the Terrier Mk 70 boosted Improved Orion, lifting 270–450-kg (600–1,000-pound) payloads into the exoatmospheric region between 97 and 201 km.
Project HARP, short for High Altitude Research Project, was a joint venture of the United States Department of Defense and Canada's Department of National Defence created with the goal of studying ballistics of re-entry vehicles and collecting upper atmospheric data for research. Unlike conventional space launching methods that rely on rockets, HARP instead used very large guns to fire projectiles into the atmosphere at extremely high speeds.
A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched. Hence, it will not complete one orbital revolution, will not become an artificial satellite nor will it reach escape velocity.
Animals in space originally served to test the survivability of spaceflight, before human spaceflights were attempted. Later, other non-human animals were flown to investigate various biological processes and the effects microgravity and space flight might have on them. Bioastronautics is an area of bioengineering research that spans the study and support of life in space. To date, seven national space programs have flown animals into space: the United States, Soviet Union, France, Argentina, China, Japan and Iran.
The Kármán line is a proposed conventional boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space set by the international record-keeping body FAI at an altitude of 100 kilometres above mean sea level. However, such definition of the edge of space is not universally adopted.
An orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit. To do this around the Earth, it must be on a free trajectory which has an altitude at perigee around 80 kilometers (50 mi); this is the boundary of space as defined by NASA, the US Air Force and the FAA. To remain in orbit at this altitude requires an orbital speed of ~7.8 km/s. Orbital speed is slower for higher orbits, but attaining them requires greater delta-v. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale has established the Kármán line at an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) as a working definition for the boundary between aeronautics and astronautics. This is used because at an altitude of about 100 km (62 mi), as Theodore von Kármán calculated, a vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself.
Private spaceflight refers to spaceflight developments that are not conducted by a government agency, such as NASA or ESA.
High-altitude balloons or stratostats are usually uncrewed balloons typically filled with helium or hydrogen and released into the stratosphere, generally attaining between 18 and 37 km above sea level. In 2013, a balloon named BS 13-08 reached a record altitude of 53.7 km.
Explorer II was a crewed U.S. high-altitude balloon that was launched on November 11, 1935, and reached a record altitude of 22,066 m (72,395 ft). Launched at 8:00 am from the Stratobowl in South Dakota, the helium balloon carried a two-man crew consisting of U. S. Army Air Corps Captains Albert W. Stevens and Orvil A. Anderson inside a sealed, spherical cabin. The crew landed safely near White Lake, South Dakota, at 4:13 pm and both were acclaimed as national heroes. Scientific instruments carried on the gondola returned useful information about the stratosphere. The mission was funded by the membership of the National Geographic Society.
Space launch is the earliest part of a flight that reaches space. Space launch involves liftoff, when a rocket or other space launch vehicle leaves the ground, floating ship or midair aircraft at the start of a flight. Liftoff is of two main types: rocket launch, and non-rocket spacelaunch.
A rockoon is a solid fuel sounding rocket that, rather than being immediately lit while on the ground, is first carried into the upper atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and ignited. This allows the rocket to achieve a higher altitude, as the rocket does not have to move under power through the lower and thicker layers of the atmosphere.
This listing of flight altitude records are the records set for the highest aeronautical flights conducted in the atmosphere, set since the age of ballooning.
The year 1954 saw the conception of Project Orbiter, the first practicable satellite launching project, utilizing the Redstone, a newly developed Short Range Ballistic Missile.
Non-rocket spacelaunch refers to theoretical concepts for launch into space where much of the speed and altitude needed to achieve orbit is provided by a propulsion technique that is not subject to the limits of the rocket equation. Although all space launches to date have been rockets, a number of alternatives to rockets have been proposed. In some systems, such as a combination launch system, skyhook, rocket sled launch, rockoon, or air launch, a portion of the total delta-v may be provided, either directly or indirectly, by using rocket propulsion.
The Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) project was a privately organized endeavour undertaken by various staff members of the British information technology website The Register to design, build, test, and launch a lightweight aerospace vehicle, constructed mostly of paper and similar structural materials, into the mid-stratosphere and recover it intact.
Martlet is an English heraldic charge depicting a stylized bird of the swallow family.
Zero 2 Infinity is a private Spanish company developing high-altitude balloons intended to provide access to near space and low Earth orbit using a balloon-borne pod and a balloon-borne launcher.
